She was not finished.
In 1956, Dorothy solved vitamin B12 — a molecule so complex that some of her colleagues, respected scientists with healthy hands and no competing difficulties, believed it simply could not be done. B12 contains nearly 200 atoms arranged in an asymmetric, intricate structure that had no precedent in the crystallographic literature. Some calculations took years. The architecture, when it finally revealed itself, was unlike anything previously seen — and essential.
B12 deficiency causes pernicious anemia, a condition of progressive neurological and physical deterioration that, without treatment, is fatal. Understanding the structure made proper treatment possible and eventually allowed doctors to identify and address the deficiency before it reached irreversible stages.
Dorothy solved it while her hands continued their slow deterioration. Photographs from that period show fingers bent at unnatural angles, joints frozen, knuckles enlarged in ways that made the hands look architectural — beautiful in a terrible way, like something that had been through tremendous force.
She kept working.
The third molecule was insulin, and it would take thirty-five years.
Dorothy began studying insulin in 1934 — the same year her arthritis was diagnosed. The molecule was massive by crystallography standards, nearly 800 atoms, and the computational tools available in the 1930s were nowhere near sufficient to decode it. So she worked on it incrementally across decades, returning to it periodically, waiting for mathematics and technology to develop the capacity to match her ambition.
When computers became powerful enough to assist with calculations that had previously consumed years of human effort, Dorothy — now in her fifties — returned to insulin with full determination.
In 1969, she published the complete structure.
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